Documenting a GSoC contributor's progress
The report should include the initial plan with dated milestones (from the contributor's project proposal - with optional modifications discussed with the mentor and the community), deliverables, etc. with progress report for each item in the initial plan. A suggestion would be to document the progress under each milestone as the contributor advances and mark the completion level of each milestone.
This field ('progress') should be updated at least once every 1-2 weeks. The idea is to have here a summary of all the work done, compared to the work committed to do.
Of course, if this field is too restrictive, the contributor can feel free to create (and link) to other pages inside the GoogleSummerOfCode space where they can provide more details on the challenges, difficulties, successes, etc. that they encountered while working on a specific milestone/task.
The contributor also needs to make sure they include links whenever some item is mentioned, whether it is a section in the design page, an image attachment (mockups, UI screenshots, etc), a version of the project, or a page where more details can be found.
Finally, the contributor must always discuss on the forum (dev category) (and optionally on the chat). This progress report does not replace forum/chat communication. On the contrary, it tries to offer a summary to interested parties on how the contributor is progressing and where do they currently stand.
Example:
Description
3-5 lines about the chosen approach and link to the Design page where technical details can be found.
Milestones
Milestone 1 [21 May - 25 May]: Scaffolding and maven project setup setup [80% complete]
I have created the maven project structure that outputs a jar for the component side and a xar for the wiki pages required by the application. I still have to create a proper testing environment
Milestone 2 [28 May - 8 June]: UI mockups and first UI prototype [50% complete]
The UI mockups (link to pictures from the Design page goes here) are done and approved by the community. I`m starting to build the UI prototype (Velocity, HTML, CSS, etc.).
Milestone 3 [11 June - 22 June]: First prototype of the Java components and script service [0% complete]
Milestone 4 [25 June - 13 July]: ... [0% complete]
...
Milestone 7 [... - 9 July]: First version of the project. Mid-term evaluation.
...so on.
Deliverables
D1 [M7]: First version, limited to functionality X, Y and Z. (link when available)
D2 [M9]: Second version, polished functionality X, Y and Z and additional V and W functionalities. (link when available)
D3 [M12]: Final version (link when available)